


And you will believe in love, and all that it's supposed to be

by hopefor46



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Banter, Body Image, Bodyswap, Developing Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 13:24:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14165778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopefor46/pseuds/hopefor46
Summary: Jon squeaked to a halt in front of the bathroom mirror, pale, tall and a little hostile-looking.“Uhhhhh,” he said, looking back at Tommy’s body, the words coming out of Tommy’s mouth.On April Fool's Day something weird happens.





	And you will believe in love, and all that it's supposed to be

Jon was being shaken awake, and he did not appreciate it. It sounded like the voice was still in his head: “Jon, you gotta get up, Jon, sorry.” His alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. He turned his head and gingerly opened one eye, but the picture blurred and fuzzed before him... why, that looked like…

It was _him_.

“What the fuck!” Jon said as he sat up, startling Pundit.

“So, um.” Not-Jon looked down at his hands, a gesture Jon had seen a million times from--

“Tommy?!”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“In _my_ body? How do I know it’s you? You could be a clone.”

“Uh, you… had the tortellini last night at the restaurant…”

“My clone would know that.”

“And I texted Dan about it and you gave me shit for it.”

“Okay, you passed,” Jon said. “Wait a sec,” he added hopping out of bed, “does this mean I…” He squeaked to a halt in front of the bathroom mirror, pale, tall and a little hostile-looking.

“Uhhhhh,” he said, looking back at Tommy’s body, the words coming out of Tommy’s mouth.

“Yeah, when I looked in the mirror I dropped my Quip and the battery rolled under the cabinet.”

“How can you think about your toothbrush at a time like this?!” Jon reached up and ran a hand through his hair, confused. His hair was soft and straight, so the gesture didn’t comfort him. “How did this happen to us?!”

“Dude, I don’t know! But it’s important that we not panic,” which made Jon even more sure it was Tommy in there, for he had never uttered that phrase in his life. “We’ll just act like everything’s normal.”

“Normal?!

“To begin with, you could at least try to sound like me,” Tommy said.

“Okay.” Jon drew in a breath and let it out, rubbing his eyes. When his reflection failed to change back into his regular self, he decided Tommy was right, and also not to tell him.

“Get dressed, we have to get to class.”

“Oh, _fine_. But what if you pull something?”

“Worry about yourself, smart guy.”

 

Barry’s was… fine, but distracting. Jon could keep up with Tommy pretty well on the treadmill, and he’d made a lot of progress on the weights, but with his new body… boy. He felt the clean burn of accomplishment and tried not to slack off too hard. _Is this what it’s like to be athletic_ , he asked himself, and tried to avoid staring at the mirrors opposite the treadmill at his own sweat-soaked shirt. Beyond his reflection, he saw Tommy struggling to unrack a weight to bring it to his bench and smiled to himself.

“Just try to stay calm,” Tommy hissed at him afterwards when they drove to the office.

“I am calm.”

“I heard you bump your head in the showers at bootcamp.” So Jon had.

“Not my fault I’m suddenly six-mumble feet tall. You would too. Aren’t you uncomfortable?”

“Honestly,” Tommy said mildly, “except for getting dressed, I haven’t been able to tell.” But as they walked across the parking lot, Tommy’s walk was unmistakably Tommy’s; even in the locker room he had taken up space easily. Not that Jon had inspected himself naked out of the corner of his eye or anything, though it was satisfying in a weird way to see his own shape at an angle he could never capture alone.

 

Luckily, work kept them busy enough that they didn’t have time to think about how they were going to fake being each other. Tanya blinked when Jon insisted that Tommy sit in on their Lovett or Leave It brainstorming meeting, but it had happened before. Jon wasn’t prepared, though, for the rest of the crew to neg Tommy-as-him so hard about not coming up with the best material… or for Tommy-as-him to gracefully shrug when he was being outclassed. (That really should have been a tipoff to everyone else. Jon started to worry that the people he worked with weren’t all that observant.) In the afternoon, Jon-as-Tommy gave a talk with the interns about postgraduate options and getting into politics, thanking his stars that Favs and Tommy had subjected him to so many campaign war stories over the years. They probably didn’t get any useful information, but at least they’d come away with a few jokes.

Everything went pretty smoothly except in Jon’s brain. Whenever he went to the restroom he was arrested, again, by the fact of Tommy’s body looking back at him in the mirror. If he hadn’t had to share the bathroom with 17 other people he probably could have locked himself in there, run his own hands over his chest and arms, admired the subtle curve of his hipbones roped with muscle. Jon felt pretty good about how he looked, more so with his new glasses, but Tommy was just… unreal. He’d mocked Tommy plenty in public for his Patagonia-catalog looks, but their whole thing was new enough that Jon didn’t really want to tell him that maybe, sometimes, those jokes were true.

Well, if they got stuck in these bodies, they’d have to deal with that later. He wondered if Tommy would want to experiment a little tonight. It didn’t really make sense for Tommy to go back to his place until they got this all sorted out. It couldn’t make things more complicated than they already were, right?

On their way out of the office Tommy tagged him by the elbow. "Wanna do something tonight? We could go to a movie, or..."

"Sounds good, " Jon said too quickly. Then, "Oh shit! Spencer and Brendan are coming over for game night. I forgot." 

"Can you cancel?"

"No, the point of game night is to make it happen regularly! You're just going to have to fake it." 

"Uh... okay." Jon silently congratulated himself that he had subjected Tommy to a few of his tabletop games in the past, at least the less intense ones. 

"I'll walk in a little late and tell them we have some work to do, okay?" He had told Spencer and Brendan that he was seeing somebody, but he hadn't gotten to the part where that somebody was his coworker and best friend of 10 years. One step at a time. 

Tommy shook his head and grinned. "You owe me for this one."

"We'll  _see_  about that. You might enjoy it. Oh, and!" He handed Tommy the leash. "You have to take Pundit too." She'd been acting kind of weird all day, running between Jon and Tommy, not convinced that she wanted to be too close to either. Could animals smell that something was awry with their owners? He wouldn't put it past Pundit. After all, she was very smart. 

 

Jon was a saint, honestly, for not taking his new look down to the beach in Santa Monica, or to that one meat market bar he used to go to when he first moved to L.A. and didn’t know where  anything good was. Even if nothing happened, he could have been fully appreciated! Instead he ran errands aimlessly so he wouldn't come over too soon. The broad beam of gratitude on Tommy’s face when he walked in the door almost made up for it.

“Hey guys,” Jon said cheerfully, forgetting he was supposed to be low-key. He stepped up behind Tommy and rested a hand on his shoulder, rubbing his thumb over Tommy’s collarbone. “What’re you playing?”

“We’re in the middle, I’ll explain it later,” Tommy tilted his head at Jon, trying to get him to be calmer. Jon really wanted to play video games, but that would be a dead giveaway.

“I’ll be in the kitchen… reading,” Jon said, knowing he would just look at his phone.

Jon watched Tommy nervously bustling around the house when Spencer and Brendan left, almost looking like himself (although usually he just left the clean-up for later).

Finally he said, “Come to bed, Tommy.”

Tommy stopped with one of Jon’s sweatshirts in his hands, mid-fold. “Do you… think we should?”

“Tommy, we _have_ to. We at least have to try. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Uh, I don’t know, I’ve never woken up in someone else’s body before.”

Jon smirked. “It could be fun. Or you could just watch me jerk off.”

“You… thought about it?” The corners of Tommy’s mouth were turning up. He had a playful streak when he was a little encouraged.

“Yeah, of course. I like… watching you,” Jon finished lamely. He also wanted to know if it was qualitatively different in a more built body, because Jon had the mind of a scientist, and also if it wasn’t that much better maybe he would stop going to Barry’s as often.

“Well, I do have an idea...”

If Tommy hadn’t been thinking about it, he was remarkably good at improvisation, because next thing Jon knew, he was on his knees pushing Tommy-as-him against the closed door to his bedroom.

“Always wondered what the full Jon Lovett experience was,” Jon winked, but he felt strangely nervous going down on himself. What if he found out he hated it? He knew what percentage of bullshit his bravado was already, but it was… good. Strangely satisfying. Of course he had to credit Tommy for knitting his fingers in his hair, pushing him in so gently at first, and then slowly increasing the pressure till he was fucking into his throat. (Tommy’s throat? Maybe he was really better at it for a reason.) It was weird hearing his own gasps, the tells that he was close, but knowing he caused them made each one play exquisitely on Jon’s nerves, and he tried to keep his mouth open and warm as Tommy came down his throat in urgent pulses. When his breath slowed, Jon scooped up Tommy and carried him over to bed, Tommy’s legs wrapped around Jon’s waist. It seemed there were advantages to being a muscle-bound jock.  

“Aren’t you going to tell me to go fuck myself?” Jon asked with raised eyebrows. But Tommy only lolled at his shoulder, licking the whorl of his ear, warm and heavy and solid.

Then, as per Jon’s specific request, Jon watched himself-as-Tommy fuck Tommy-as-him in exquisite detail thanks to the closet mirror they’d yanked into the bedroom. As if never before, Jon appreciated the flexing muscles in his (well, Tommy’s) ass, the constellation of freckles so unlikely in skin rarely touched by the sun, the way his shoulders worked below Tommy’s (well, Jon’s) ankles as he held his legs up. He’d fucked him before, but not like this.

“God, your ass,” Jon said, rapidly losing the plot. Tommy-as-him looked dazed and dopey post-orgasm and he smiled up at Jon, bringing one hand up to stroke his face. That was all Tommy; Jon never looked like that, at least not that he’d remembered. Jon wanted to keep watching but as he came he felt his entire face clench, his eyes snap shut.

“ _That_ was your idea?” Jon said still breathless when they had sprawled out in bed away from each other. He felt exhausted, which was surprising because he thought of Tommy as a font of endless energy.

“I…” Tommy blushed into his pillow. “I wanted to know what it felt like. Not, like, being fucked, but like what _you_ felt like.”

“And what did you think? An improvement on the norm?” Tommy blushed deeper. “Tommy, you know I won’t let you sleep until you give me an honest performance review.” Of course, if Tommy liked it better there wasn’t much they could do about it.

“S'you that makes it good,” Tommy mumbled into his pillow. One of his hands snaked out and grabbed Jon’s. His hand was so small and when Jon squeezed it, he felt warm all over. Maybe living in Tommy’s body had made him more sentimental.

“Good, ‘cause you can’t expect me to double in size overnight.”

“You monster,” Tommy muttered, but Jon could tell he was smiling. One more thing tickled at Jon’s mind.

“But, like, the door--”

“I always like watching you fall apart.” Jon squeezed his hand, thankful that the dark room hid his own blush, hoping he wouldn’t accidentally cough out the words: _I’ve fallen in love with you._

 

When Jon extricated himself from Tommy and got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night, he was back to his original body. It didn’t fully click for him till he was leaning against the doorway watching Tommy sleep, all limbs and muscles. Despite his physical reality, he looked so much younger when he dozed off, like when he would nap in Jon’s office in the White House. Jon wanted to wrap him in bubble wrap and protect him from the slightest scratch. He wanted to kneecap anyone who made him feel like he wasn’t smart enough for his job. The fact that he was getting hotter with age? That was just a bonus.  

So much he wanted to tell him, but instead he got back into bed and attached himself to Tommy’s back like a koala, letting his regular, even breaths lull him back under. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is really slapdash and unedited so hopefully you're not allergic to adverbs.


End file.
